


It's Not Alive: X-Files, "I Want To Believe"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [34]
Category: The X-Files, The X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, chris carter has lost his mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 03:30:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3193634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The show’s painful demise, in other words, is all over this film, steaming from all of its pores and filling our nostrils with the scent of rotting autumn leaves. Chris Carter wants to believe that this show can come back to life. But he can’t, really; and you can slice into this film at any point and find evidence of his own lack of faith. I Want To Believe  is not a development in an ongoing story; it’s a post-mortem, a coda or epilogue in which Carter reflects on the problem named in the film’s title—something which he always intended to be the main question of the show, before it got away from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Not Alive: X-Files, "I Want To Believe"

  * So, my X-Files rewatch is finally 100% complete. Well, 99%, really, because I didn’t rewatch either of the Donny Pfaster episodes, because they creep me out. But I have now seen all the X-Files there is.

Watching  _I Want To Believe_ so soon after rewatching  _Fight the Future_ was interesting, because you can really what a difference ten years made—and not primarily to the actors, although you can certainly see the ten years on Duchovny’s face and oddly enough, Anderson looks significantly more careworn in  _I Want To Believe_ than she does in  _The Fall._ It’s about the life cycle of the show itself.  _Fight the Future_ was released between Season 5 and Season 6, at a time when the show’s popularity was reaching its peak. Although, characteristically, the plot of FTF is maddeningly inconclusive, the film is bursting with vitality, energy, and urgency. There are Big Things going on out there in the shadows. Plots are being hatched. Plans are afoot. Villains are maneuvering. In the midst of it all, Mulder and Scully are charging around, managing somehow to blunder across a number of ‘secret’ operations. Mulder’s quest to rescue Scully from the clutches of the conspiracy is cast in the visual language of fairy-tale romance; he’s the prince trying to get to Snow White in her glass coffin, the hero who singlehandedly enters the necromancer’s lair to drag his true love to safety. Despite all the horrors that both go through, they resolve at the end of the film to continue the fight, both confident that they are doing something worthwhile by standing up to the conspiracy.

In contrast,  _I Want To Believe,_ filmed six years after the show’s entirely regrettable ninth season finally limped to its demise, is suffused with melancholy. Everything seems to be either dying or dead. Nobody’s sure any more what they’re fighting for or why it matters. Mulder and Scully have each other, still; but that doesn’t seem to be bringing either of them that much comfort. Apart from one scene with them in bed together, when Mulder very touchingly offers to take over the job of cursing God in the darkness so Scully can take a break from it and sleep, they don’t seem especially happy together. Each of them seems to be viewing the other as a particularly troublesome part of the vast disappointment that life after the FBI has been for them. 

The show’s painful demise, in other words, is all over this film, steaming from all of its pores and filling our nostrils with the scent of rotting autumn leaves. Chris Carter wants to believe that this show can come back to life. But he can’t, really; and you can slice into this film at any point and find evidence of his own lack of faith.  _I Want To Believe_ is not a development in an ongoing story; it’s a post-mortem, a coda or epilogue in which Carter reflects on the problem named in the film’s title—something which he always intended to be the main question of the show, before it got away from him.

The season 1 episode “Conduit” closes with Scully listening to Mulder’s old hypnotherapy tapes. While we hear his voice responding to a male interlocutor, we move from Scully in her office looking at a picture of Mulder and Samantha as kids to a scene of Mulder sitting in a church, overshadowed by a huge stained-glass window, looking at another picture of him and Samantha as kids and crying. The Mulder of the Past says that as Samantha is being taken, he hears a voice telling him that she’s safe and that no harm will come to her. “Do you believe the voice?” says the man. Mulder says, “I want to believe.”

Looking back it’s interesting to me that this scene happens in a church. Because it suggests that from very early on, Mulder’s belief in the paranormal—including alien abductions—was standing in for a different kind of belief which had been increasingly discredited in the 20th century: belief in a compassionate God who would make and keep all the promises that the voice in Mulder’s hypno-memory makes to him: don’t worry, your loved one has been taken from you, but it’s OK. She’s alive, in another place that you can’t get to; she’s safe there, she’s happy there, you’ll see her again. Mulder wants to believe that; everyone who’s lost someone wants to believe that. But as we learn more about the material world and about what human beings seem to have the freedom to do to each other, it gets harder and harder to sustain belief in a benevolent and omnipotent God or in a heavenly afterlife—and for those of us not of the persuasion, the rise of right-wing evangelical Christianity in America, which assumes an increasing amount of political power in the 1980s, didn’t help. 

Mulder’s belief in alien abduction, in the existence of extraterrestrial life, and even in the existence of the shadowy conspiracy planning to facilitate the alien takeover of earth, function for him the same way that belief in an afterlife functions for Christians: it convinces him that his sister is not completely lost and that he will eventually be reunited with her. But because of the form that this faith takes, he can’t trust that this reunion will just happen of its own accord after he dies. The world Samantha’s been taken to is a material world, though possibly beyond our planetary boundaries. The people keeping her there are mortal, though some of them might not be actually human. To get her back, he will have to travel, struggle, battle, etc. until he reaches the place where they’ve taken her. And that’s what originally defined his character: his belief in his sister’s materialist and secular but, from an evidence point of view, just as impossible-to-prove afterlife.

Scully, as the skeptic who doesn’t believe in the paranormal, is assigned to him in hopes of keeping him in check; but it becomes clear even in Season One that her real job is to serve as the credible witness who can confirm the existence of a reality which we would otherwise write off as Mulder’s delusions. The point of her being a scientist and a skeptic is that once SHE believes something, than we, the materialist and rationalist viewers, have to believe in it too. 

As early as “Beyond the Sea” in Season One, however, we discover that Scully wants to believe too. What she wants to believe in is God, rather than aliens; and when she has paranormal experiences which don’t originate with Mulder, they’re usually represented in religious terms. As the show goes on, these two versions of belief become more entangled; you can see it, certainly, in “Christmas Carol/Emily,” and don’t get me started on the Spaceship of God in “Biogenesis.”

"I Want To Believe" has given up entirely on the alien mythology, and that’s one of the things that makes it seem so—as it were—alien to the fans. Apparently there is no alien invasion underway, and there is no conspiracy out there trying to crush Fox Mulder so that he can’t expose it. "The Truth" has been forgotten; Mulder is supposed to be a fugitive, but nothing about the way he and Scully are living suggests that anyone is really looking very hard for him, and when he comes out of the woodwork and into the bosom of the FBI again there are no repercussions. The alien mythology led Mulder not to reunion with his sister but to confirmation of her death. The only hope still held out to him of recovering her now is the existence of that spectral double that gives him a hug in "Closure." Apparently the soul does exist. Apparently it is immortal. Apparently religious faith is closer to being right than Mulder’s faith in abductions and conspiracies was.

So in a way, really, “I Want To Believe” is less about the X-Files, or even about Mulder and Scully, than it is about wanting to believe. Specifically, it’s about wanting to believe, not just in God, but in a Catholic Church which has been exposed, in the years between 1998 and 2008, as an all-too-human institution, many of whose leaders and members have not lived up to the trust their parishioners put in them. Scully’s characterization in IWTB strikes us as weird partly because she is now the vehicle for all the anger directed at the Catholic Church after the priest sexual abuse scandals started breaking. To the extent that this plot is about Mulder and Scully as characters at all, the whole point seems to be to force Scully to believe—at least temporarily—that Father Joe was in fact doing God’s work (which would imply a) the existence of God b) the existence of the paranormal and c) that God forgives even priests who have “buggered 37 altar boys”). The resolution of the film is far less about resolving their relationship problems, which appear to evaporate the moment that Scully clocks the axe-wielding maniac who’s about to cut Mulder up, than it is about determining whether she believes in Father Joe or not; and the film’s final scene (apart from the WTF that is the final credits) is of her once again acting on Father Joe’s advice, trusting that God was in fact speaking through him. 

So IWTB is consistent with the show to this extent: Scully is, once again, being used to verify the existence of the paranormal phenomena that the rest of the world denies—and denies even harder in 2008. In the scene in which he’s introduced, Mulder is pinning up an article about Princeton closing down their paranormal research lab, as he asks rather bitterly, “But who believes in that crap any more?” The world has left him and his paranormal phenomena behind as surely as it has left behind Mulder’s beloved media—the newspaper clipping, the slide show, the grainy photograph. But the Church is still there, and it’s still fighting evil, since even its least savory priests are capable of becoming God’s vessels and saving young women from the sick and twisted gay men who want to cut them up for parts in order to prolong a marriage that this same Catholic Church still sees as “inherently disordered,” a judgment with which the film, given how grotesquely it treats its married gay couple, appears to enthusiastically concur.

But in most other ways, it is the opposite of fanservice. It’s the very last thing that most X-Philes looking forward to a second movie would want. It essentially falsifies the alien conspiracy plot line in which all nine seasons of the show were invested. Instead of showing us Mulder and Scully happy at last, it shows them miserable and estranged. Instead of giving us one last chance to see them team up together and kick some conspiracy ass, it keeps them separate for most of the film. Instead of giving us one more chance to see Scully and Mulder comfort each other after a hideous trauma, it sticks Skinner out there in the snow cuddling Mulder in the fetal position while Scully goes in to be a Medical Doctor and save someone we’ve barely met. Their final scene together is supposed to be the one in which they recover their great love for each other, but to me it seemed as off as the rest of the film; their final kiss seems weirdly dispassionate—maybe just because I’ve been seeing the Fight the Future outtake kiss once a day since I started following humancredentials—and the resolution is still suspended. Mulder says that if Scully has any doubts she should cancel the surgery and they can get the hell out of there, let the darkness try to find them, etc. But she goes ahead and does the surgery, so evidently she doesn’t have any doubts. So are they going to run away and let the darkness try to find them now, or not? We don’t know, because the film proper ends with Scully deciding to operate. 

Anyway. That’s my initial reaction. IWTB returns the show to Carter’s original preoccupations, and shows you I guess just how much of what we all loved about it was always considered by him to be secondary. I’m glad I’ve seen it. But now I think I’m going to try to forget it. I’ll try to remember the show the way it was in its prime, when human agency still mattered and the passion was still there and the fight was still on. 





End file.
